Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg

Transit 504

Do you know this strange feeling of being stranded in a transit zone after several hours of travelling? In a place like this, time is of no importance. You are tired, dehydrated and numb; you wander around aimlessly while longing for your destination. There is no way you can get out of the zone, except through the passenger gate.
Transit 504 is a genuine Internet project. Like a traffic hub, it is a transit terminal conceived to act as a platform for connecting Internet art projects. From here, various existing and future Studer/van den Berg projects will be gradually added as travel destinations. The 3D architecture of the terminal building will never be completed, and it will change like a building that reflects the needs of its users. In this project, the Internet is a time machine, a device for accessing and distributing. It is not meant to celebrate the latest software achievements but aims at collating disparate scenes of the journey, making use of the narrative structures of a hypertext web.
The presentation on display at the Nicolas Krupp gallery marks the starting point of this disposition. The localities are already arranged; their connectivity, however, must remain a future promise. Like the Hotel Vue des Alpes, transit 504 is conceived as a large work in progress on the Internet. As opposed to the Hotel Vue des Alpes group of works, which started in the year 2000, and which features a similar topological structure based on representational images, this does not bring to mind the familiar Alpine idyll. Instead, there is a feeling of ennui that comes over someone who has to stay in the limbo of a waiting zone for endless hours - but lacking the option of a chance encounter with a fellow traveller: the setting is the main act, and not a decoration for social interaction in cyberspace.
With this, the 3D modelled locations offer more than enough pictorial resources for a new series of large-scale inkjet prints, with motifs of a strange aesthetic quality condensed from the digital time trap of the transit 504 terminal.